Let me ask you a simple question – what is the purpose of a business?
It’s a trick question that catches out most people, including me!
The vast majority of people would say that the purpose of a business is to make a profit, but in fact the REAL purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.
You can have the finest products and services in the world, but if you don’t have a customer you’re dead in the water.
So the purpose of a private practice is to acquire and keep a patient, and if you do this often enough in a cost-effective way then a profit will be the result.
Over the years I have interviewed so many private practice owners and discovered, to no great surprise, that every highly profitable practice is focussed almost entirely on acquiring and keeping patients.
And when you look at those that are struggling, you will find owners who complain they hardly have any time to do this.
This is a natural situation to get into because as human beings, unconsciously we tend to move away from discomfort towards comfort, and discomfort is addressing the elements of your life that you fear the most.
So we make up all kinds of little excuses to avoid doing what we know has to be done.
Fundamentally, what I have found is that all highly successful aesthetic practice owners have developed the ability to focus and concentrate on those few things that potentially represent the greatest single economic benefit to them.
Those that struggle allow themselves to become so busy that they diffuse their energy; they do so many things that their energy disperses and diffuses and pretty soon they’re exhausted, burned out, tired and not making any progress.
Incidentally, one of my coaches told me that, as a general rule of thumb for success, small business owners should be spending at least 50% of their time on customer acquisition (i.e. marketing.)
But I know many aesthetic practice owners who struggle to find 90 minutes each month to learn and implement new marketing skills because they are so busy with 101 other things!
So if this sounds like you, make a list of everything that you do in the course of a week (or a month); all your activities from the time you start work on a Monday morning to the time you finish on Friday or Saturday.
And then ask yourself this question,
‘If I could only do one thing on this list, which one activity would contribute the greatest value to my practice?’
It will usually pop out at you – put a circle around it, then ask yourself this question,
‘If I could only do ONE MORE thing on this list, what would be the second thing I would do that would contribute the most value to my practice?’
Put a circle around it, and then ask the same question one last time.
Now you have identified three activities.
Without looking at your list, I can tell you that those three activities account for more than 90% of all the value you bring to your practice.
Everything else is a support task, a complementary task, a ‘do it later’ task, a delegable task.
In other words those three things are the keys and the interesting thing is that if you put them in a triangular form then the peak of the triangle is the most important thing that you do and the other two activities are the critical support activities that usually make the number 1 activity possible.
From now on discipline yourself to do only those 3 things all day long and I promise you, you’ll double your profits.
Give yourself a grade of 1-10 on each of these 3 activities.
The lowest grade is where you’re having the biggest problems right now.
So give ultimate priority to developing that particular skill.
What about all the other activities?
Well by definition, they are a distraction to keep you away from doing the things that contribute the greatest value to your practice (and hence your life).
So delegate them, outsource them, defer them until later, or eliminate them.
But keep yourself focussed 80% of the day on those three activities and do nothing but those.
It’s called the law of three.
Best Wishes
Pam